Ghostly Memories
by Lady Ayisha
Summary: Christine is left alone, without the two men who have ruled her life in their own ways for the last thirty years... but in the end... Legal Note: The lyrics throughout the story DO NOT BELONG TO ME. They belong to Sarah Mclaughlin and co.


_Listen as the wind blows_

_Across the great divide_

_Voices trapped in yearning_

_Memories trapped in time._

Yes, _Christine thought wearily as she laid her head back against the plush back of the chair in the box seat she'd reserved at the beginning of the Opera season. _Trapped in yearning. Yearning for better days, when our voices were young and pure and bright with the knowledge that we would all live forever._ The seat beside her was achingly empty, but then, the curtains of the box across the auditorium hadn't moved in the hour and a quarter she'd spent in this seat, either. She couldn't decide which was more heartbreaking._

_The night is my companion_

_And solitude my guide_

_Would I spend forever here_

_And not be satisfied?_

_In the end, she had answered her own question. Forever is the length of summer to a child as the clouds rolled lazily by on a sky that is as endless as the reaches of his imagination. Forever is the span of the lifetime of one's first love, when one believes its fire shall burn as brightly as a midsummer night's dream forever, _

_But forever can also have other, less pleasant eternal comparisons. Forever is the amount of time a young person truly believes they will live, and the seat next to her, one that had been empty for the last thirty years, told Christine just how much of a fallacy that belief truly was. She had spent her forever here, without either of the men she had loved so deeply, and now she was left alone to realise just how short – and long! - a time it had truly been._

_She glanced across the span of the auditorium again, watching the fuzzy outline of the still fabric that draped its eternal velvet weight over the silent darkness in the box. The haunted box. The Ghost's box. Box Five, which, as far as she knew, had never been sold since Then._

_Then. Then, she had been a girl, frightened and alone and torn between two beautiful, __wondrous__ men, who had both come away with so much of her soul held in their grasps that she knew she could never hope to see Heaven's ethereal gates. For a person dispossessed of a soul could never hope to come home to the arms of God. Her husband had gone home to Him, she remembered that, but his soul had been calm and full of the peace her lies had provided it, each and every time she had ever told him she had loved him._

_'Then' had been a very long time ago, and its impact had been lost in the twisting, winding paths of her life since its time had passed. Forever was a very long time, too, in its own way._

_Forever, that great, beautiful, endless stretch of time in which a young lord believes he will outlive the sun. Forever, that painful, terrible, vast expanse of moments that lies between the space of a horse's hoof and the last, horrible moment before it strikes one's skull._

_Forever young, forever together, forever old, forever apart... So long, for so very long, she had been alone. She stared at the hanging curtains again, half-believing that her deep sighs were stirring them and allowing her to see the form of a man huddled behind them. But there was no man. Once again, she was left behind._

Through this world I've stumbled

So many times betrayed

Trying to find an honest word

To find the truth enslaved

_How many times, she wondered, had she been left? Betrayed? How many times had her world been turned upside-down by the men who had defined it? Her father had committed the ultimate betrayal when he had left her, desolate and alone, to face the Paris stage and the blooming of her musical career, without him. And Raoul, dear, sweet, Raoul – he had betrayed her, too. She had told him, oh, God, she'd told him to stay away, to STAY AWAY from Erik, and yet he had come, and he had almost died, and ... _

_And he had killed the light in her Angel's eyes that night, she remembered. It was a light she had never seen again. He had been so sure that at last, he had captured her heart, and then ... She shook her head, not even sure now which man she'd meant._

_It was odd, though, she thought, opening her rheumy eyes and running her shivering hands, criss-crossed with veins and palsied with age, through her whitened hair. It was odd, but Raoul's death had not been considered a betrayal._

_Dare she think, instead, that it had been a relief?_

_She hadn't had to pretend anymore – she hadn't had to wake up each morning, ready to paste a false smile on her face, or profess fake words of love – _how simple those three words got to be as they slid off my tongue, and never once did I mean them!

_Lying was a sin, she had always been told, for the Devil was the Prince of Lies, and to practice his handiwork was to turn one's face from God. Even if she'd been possessed of a soul at the end of her marriage to Raoul, the thousand days she'd spent lying to him as they'd lain tangled in the sheets of their marriage bed, her lies to him alone would have denied her a home in God's arms._

Did _you_ go home, Erik? Are you listening to the Requiems now, as you sit at His feet? Do you think of me, or am I so damned now that my punishment is to be forgotten by the ones I loved the most?

_She cried a little then, for That Day had been even worse than the ones her tired mind could only conceive as Then. It had been the days – weeks? - after Raoul's death, and she had come here – fled here – in hopes of finding some solace from her grief in the Opera's music-filled halls. Instead, all she had come to was silence; the Opera had been closed for the week of summer renovation that occurred ever year, and as it had been a Sunday – and she, a good God-fearing child, not at church with the rest of them! - there had been no one at all on the site._

_Except one. Oh, how she had known he would be here? He, with his strange complexion and burning eyes, scalding her soul as though his heathen god were damning her with every breath. He, the Persian, Daroga, Nadir... Erik's only friend._

_This time, no words passed between them. This time, he simply lifted his hands and led her down to the secret place below the Opera, the last sanctuary for a man who should have been a god. Without speaking, he poled her across the lake in a little rowboat, and to this day, she never knew whether he had actually been there at all. Into the little house she had gone, her heart beating so fast in her throat that she felt she would surely die – and she would deserve any fate which came for her afterwards if she did! - but nothing prepared her for what she found. _

_Her angel had been sitting up in his great chair by the fire, the very same one at whose base she had sat as they'd whiled away hours spent pleasantly together as he had told her stories of his travels, and had even attempted to teach her the rudiments of drawing. He was maskless, but that wasn't – for once! - what made her recoil. _

_It was his very stillness that had repulsed her, and it was that same motionlessness that spurred her forward in the next breath._

And I would be the one

To hold you down

Kiss you so hard

I'll take your breath away

And after I'd wipe away the tears,

Just close your eyes, dear...

_She flew to him and knelt, sobbing, at his feet, and whatever God there was above – Christine was already well aware that she would never meet Him, whoever He was – took pity on her, for the man who should have taken His place stirred. From deep within their skull-like sockets, yellow eyes that were no more than firelight's forgotten reflections opened with a slowness that was almost painful, and the seemingly-lipless mouth moved without making a sound, but she knew what he was saying, of course._

Forever is the space between one heartbeat and the next. Forever is the only word we have to describe the moments between looking into the mirror and falling in love.

_Forever was as long as she had wanted to do what she did now. She pressed his withered frame back into the great, soft embrace of the chair and kissed him, covering his pallid skin, as yellow as the bones hiding inexpertly beneath, of his face with her kisses. He cried without shame, then, as she had known he would, but there was no energy, no passion, beneath his tears and there had always been such life in her Erik, her maestro, her wondrous, magical Angel, that there was more terror than she'd ever believed there could be in _not _feeling his lips press back against her own. She cried then, for both of them, and it was only later that she realised with a pang of something that felt suspiciously like guilt, that not one of her tears had been shed so eloquently for Raoul._

Oh, you speak to me in riddles and

You speak to me in rhymes

My body aches to breathe your breath

Your words keep me alive.

_Her body had ached for him for so very long, but in the rush and torrent of her life, she hadn't been able to decipher what it was she'd wanted all along, and then he was gone. _

_She had kissed him once more, she remembered, opening her dim blue eyes and staring not at the lights and sounds blaring their fury across the stage far below, but at the darkness through which she had stumbled to reach him, and in the middle of that kiss, she had felt his breath whisper from his lungs for the final time. Into her body, she had taken his final breath, the whisper of life that should have belonged to an angel or a God, and instead, had been wasted on a demon such as she. _

Into this night I wander

It's morning that I dread.

_And oh, how she'd dreaded facing the light once more. It had been old Morley who had found her, wandering complacently in the darkness, day-old tears staining her face and God only knew what else on her clothes. She'd fought him, she remembered, insisting that she didn't want to go back out into the light because ... because... _

_She'd gone with him anyway, and had spent a brief time in seclusion in England, surrounded by sweeping meadows and brightly lit rooms where sunlight took the place of wallpaper, and shadows were chased daily from every corner by nurses whose cheerful smiles were as much a part of their required uniform as were their hats or shoes._

_But the truth was, in those brief slivers of forever that lasted as long as the time between the last glimpse of sun over the horizon and the lighting of the too-bright gas lamps that were the inhabitants' defense against the crawling shadows of the night, Christine welcomed the coming of the dark. For in the dark, there was always a man, a man who could be seen best by raising her head up, up, up so that she could see the fire of his yellow eyes. He always faced her so that she could pinpoint him by those very orbs in the fragment of moments between the sunset and the emergence of the gaslight._

_She never saw him in the twin space that came before dawn, in the moments between the dimming of the gaslights and the rising of the sun, and she suspected he could not come to her then because he never could bear the sight of her tears, and she always cried in the mornings._

Another day of knowing of

The path I fear to tread.

_For so long, she had feared the coming of the day and the death of the shadows, but after a time, she had learned to pretend that life could go on and take her with it on its merry way, and she was free to watch the shadows come in and not have to light the gas lamps for days, unless there was company, of which there was very little over the years between Raoul's death and now._

_When the shadows had begun to steal her vision perhaps ten years ago, an odd peace had come over her, for Christine had not been born blind, and, behind her closed lids, could still recall in sharp relief the things her eyes could no longer see when open. The shadows had come, and her Erik had returned to her, but he did not beckon her. He had simply waited._

Into the sea of waking dreams

I follow without pride

'Cause nothing stands between us here

And I won't be denied.

_She turned and stared at the Ghost's Box with her nearly sightless eyes, and at last, she saw him, beckoning to her as he had not called for her in so very long. His lipless mouth moved, and she did not have to trust her failing hearing to understand what he was saying._

_She should have known her angel would never be denied, she thought, her lips turning up in a smile. He demands it... And whatever he demands... She did not even flinch as footsteps, quiet as whispers, approached her seat. Her eyes did not open as a voice so ethereal in its beauty that it could – and had, many times before – reduce angels to tears, began to sing._

And I would be the one

To hold you down

Kiss you so hard

I'll take your breath away

Just close your eyes...

_But her lips kissed back as Erik's descended on them, and as the two pressed together in Christine's final moments, one last sigh was freed from its prison behind her lips and taken into the ghostly form of the man who had held her heart for the better part of forty years._

_It was the box-keeper that found her body resting peacefully in the chair next to her husband's, and there were stories told, amongst the tears shed at her funeral, about her unending devotion to the man who had captured her heart and the music that had brought them together._

_Erik smiled as he placed his Christine's small fingers in the great expanse of his own palm and walked with her into the gathering shadows in the churchyard. Today, they had been married ..._

_And tomorrow, they would begin their forever._


End file.
